


Shadows

by WahlBuilder



Category: The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Suicidal Thoughts, Wakes & Funerals, War, set Abundance on fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:28:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24701566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: It isn't always killing on the front, even for Melvin Mancer. He meets a technomancer who asks for the most ordinary thing: a razor, for shaving. And that technomancer just happens to be Auroran.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Shadows

“A tank!”

The word ran through Melvin’s body faster than his conscious mind could caught up. There was a technomancer somewhere, he knew, but a tank was a more immediate threat. He saw its hulking form — a repurposed rover. The Colonists and Melvin’s fathers would have been appalled at the sight of such modification, twisting the nature and spirit of the initial design.

There were no politics here on the battlefield, no fancy words. Just chaos — not the awesome beauty of existence, but the chaos of human making: ugly and contrary to nature.

The immediacy of death pushed Melvin forward. He ran towards the tank and strode right onto the hull, as though up the steps, his power coiled in his hand, hungry to unravel the very universe. He paused briefly, feeling lives inside the metal hulk, and ramped up the charge so that their lungs stopped faster.

Then he channeled the chaos into the tank.

The flare was blinding even to him.

Then, it got quiet. Everything was quiet. Or maybe he was just… shocked. What irony.

His tongue was thick, stuck to the roof of his mouth. He coughed and jumped off. His hand burned, and pain sizzled underneath the skin. Everything was bathed in red, but he couldn’t tell whether it was his vision or the heat of the metal eight in front of him. He wanted to reach up and rub his eyes, but stopped himself, digging fingers into his staff. He felt nothing, physically and emotionally. That tank was full of death of his making, poured from him into its mold, leaving Melvin himself hollow.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a flash of blue, and shifted into a combat stance — but the other raised their hands.

“A technomancer! Cousin! I am Veracity, sister of the Third— Ah, it doesn’t matter. Peace!” She rubbed her be-stubbled chin, leaving a smear of red dirt, and smiled rather shyly. “Cousin, I’ve a rather trivial ask: do you have a razor?”

The storm in Melvin’s head quietened a bit, enough that he could comprehend the question. He thought on the contents of his rucksack. “I think I have, cousin.”

The small mirror with a faint crack was propped on the hull of a rover cut by painted triangles, now almost scraped off. A cup of water was to the right of the mirror. Veracity had taken off her gloves, and they were tucked under her rope belt.

Melvin puzzled at the belt. There was another belt under it, from leather, and this rope didn’t make sense. Except that... It did, at the same time. A piece of rope could be useful. Chores in a camp. Binding prisoners. Hanging oneself.

Veracity was shaving with visible pleasure, eyes falling half-closed. The razor was one of the cassetted type — a coveted prize that Melvin was keeping in case he needed to establish some semblance of normalcy or to trade. On the front, like so many other things, Serum had no meaning and people turned to that ancient tradition of barter plus using cigarettes as currency. Razor cassettes and alcohol were an order higher, coming up to hundreds in cigarette terms.

“Spirits, I was going crazy,” Veracity sighed, flicking foam down onto the rocks. It caked almost immediately from the heat.

Melvin took his flask and added more water to the cup by the mirror.

Veracity followed his gesture and her eyes narrowed in a smile. “Thank you. Really.” There was a speck of foam on her left cheek. “Wait, aren’t you... Ah, I’m so bad with your names. Melvin? Major Melvin Mancer?”

Melvin stoppered his flask, calculating how fast she could put on her gloves, how fast he could draw his pistol, how fast—

No. No, there would be no more killing today. He had decided. They had decided.

“Didn’t know I was notorious.” Him? He was a major, yes, the youngest in the history of the Order, but it didn’t say anything about him.

“Enough that your face is known.” Veracity snorted, shaved that fleck of foam off, then turned her head this way and that. Smiled at herself in the mirror, apparently pleased.

Then she took a rag, also under the rope, dipped it into the cup, and wiped her face slowly, forcefully, her eyes filling with sadness just for a moment — then the rag went over her face again, and it was serene.

Her attire was the long one, and lacking many parts: the armbands and legbands, pauldrons, the collar… It was the blue over the bodyglove, with long tails separable from the rest if needed, as Melvin had been explained to. He would have winced in sympathy if he could: getting sand out of the bodyglove was a bitch of a task, if certain precautions hadn’t been taken. He didn’t know if Aurorans had standard-issue bodygloves: he had seen enough of gutted technomancers to last a lifetime of nightmares, but each time there had been something different. Wires stripped of the insulating layer, shining with blue. Strips of linen lining. Padding around the middle because the owner had lost a lot of weight but there hadn’t been time or tools to proper adjustment. There was a measure of jury-rigging on the front everywhere where people couldn’t afford to keep their shit in a factory state, but that customization seemed different.

Though he couldn’t be sure. Thrown here and there, to whatever position Abundance wanted him in, Melvin didn’t meet technomancers all that often, and Aurora didn’t use them much anyway.

He leaned on the rover. “Do you… need anything?”

She looked at him, smiled. He wondered how old she was. People usually got Mancer ages grossly wrong, and though Melvin was a technomancer, he couldn’t be certain with Aurorans.

“Only my voice and salt. And water.” She peered into the cup. “This would be enough.” She spread the rag on the warm rover, rinsed the razor sparingly, put it carefully, almost with reverence, on the rag. And went to their people.

He expected… some change to happen, maybe. The full attire appearing somehow? He could tell that Aurorans, for all their reputation for “crazy”, were practical: he had seen their field uniform more often than the blues. Melvin didn’t take his dress uniform to the front anymore: it was heavy, cumbersome, and anyway he didn’t wear it well. If Abundance wanted him to parade on the front, she should have organized the delivery herself. But maybe Aurorans carried theirs, for occasions such as these?

Yet no pauldrons were magicked out of the air, no armbands glinted in the floodlights of the camp and the rovers. Only dust was Veracity’s adornment.

They went to a row of nine bodies covered with whatever rags the two units could find for their dead, one rover’s lights feeble in the creeping darkness of the night over that row. There were no flags, and like this it was impossible to tell who was Auroran and who was from Abundance, down on the ground. Melvin saw one of the still standing soldiers — not his — frowning briefly and looking from body to body, as though trying to remember which belonged to which corporation.

“Will you be singing over _them_ also?” another asked, pointing not to the dead but to the living members of Melvin’s unit. That soldier looked ready to fight, or to crumble — Melvin didn’t know their face, but at the same time he’d seen such faces too many times.

Veracity grinned. “If ye ken a single difference between them and yourselves — aside from their funny accents — that prevents me from doing so, then tell me and maybe I’ll listen,” she said cheerfully.

No more objections followed. Melvin wasn’t sure what he’d have done if anyone had protested further. He never struck his soldiers — they were not his slaves, not his tools, they were, in many ways, more deserving of peace than him. But if anyone had raised stink...

He kept away, behind Veracity. Didn’t feel it was his right to join the soldiers. Among those bodies lay the ones whom he led to death and the ones whose life he had fried up just a short time ago.

And he never was one for ceremonies. Even those scarce he’d attended back ho— back in Ophir always left him uneasy, especially after his first tour. He felt forever cut off from anything that was normal, anything that was comforting for his family — he was a murderer, he didn’t have the right to consolation.

He waited for that dreaded vibration in his stomach, the feeling of being where he shouldn’t be.

Veracity took a small blue pouch, somehow the only thing on her not dusted by rust, opened it one-handed and scooped white... Salt, Melvin reminded himself. It was salt. He remembered the brief aside about importance of salt for Aurorans, from “cultural briefings”, of all things: those times when the command tried to pretend they were going on a friendly picnic and not to kill those people whose traditions they offered to study.

Veracity raised the scoopful of salt to her face, then nodded — just slightly, as though only to herself. Light caught in freely falling crystals, as though they were stars — and tears filled Melvin’s eyes.

Veracity sang.

He didn’t understand the words — it was a language he had heard but didn’t know yet — and it wasn’t necessary. A farewell was the same in all languages. Veracity’s voice, low, coming from the chest, didn’t carry far: it was too scraped, too burned, flattened by dust. Yet it was enough. There weren’t many people here to sing to.

Melvin dropped his gaze.

He watched her feet moving between bodies — and stars of salt crystals falling and falling, getting into creases of cloth, adding to the salt of the ground — and then it melted away with the few drops of water Veracity spared on it.

His throat was closed and he waited, a part of him watching this from the side, waited for when this big, stupid body encased in dark gray that stood up here like a rotting sore would crumble.

But it didn’t. He didn’t.

Melvin didn’t smoke much. He knew Sean had picked it in the army as a habit and not as an occasional “I-am-an-adult” bit. Almost everyone smoked in the army — it was an excuse for a break from all the tedium and horror, an excuse for a moment of bonding, even between officers and soldiers, though that was rare. Drinking was like that, too, but most tried not to pick it. Even though on the front they were given their “frontline two-hundred”, being caught drunk meant summary execution. Commissars were ever-vigilant — even overeager sometimes.

He’d shot his current unit’s commissar some time ago, for whipping a soldier near to death.

Death was so easy to spread, plenty to go around here.

Melvin’s vice was tea. That terrible stuff packed into tight bricks which had to be sawed or crashed with a hammer — the awful stuff that tasted like… Like something foul would taste. He entertained himself with trying to find comparisons, on those nights he couldn’t sleep at all. Like licking the Esplanade? Like biting a mouthful of a Vory jacket?

It was so horrendous that nothing in the entire universe could make it better. Too strong no matter what, even if you diluted it until it was barely even brown. Melvin wondered if his taste buds atrophied little by little with each tour and each cup.

Yet the process of making it was soothing, it was something warm — truly warm, not like alcohol — to drink on icy nights, and it could be shared. The kettle made a nice sound as water bubbled in it. It was merry. It reminded him of nearly-constantly warmed and emptied, warmed and emptied kettle in Connor’s office.

The kettle was his, but cups were Veracity’s. The tent was his, but a rolled-up thin mattress on which they were to recline was Veracity’s. The tea cake — (Veracity objected: “No! Tea cakes are buns, this is a tea _briquette_!”) — was Veracity’s too. It was funny to find that it was just as terrible as in Abundance: Melvin had to hack into it and pry bits away into their cups.

“I should leave you some chocolate,” Veracity said. She stretched her long legs. The blue robe was resting behind her, folded very neatly in an almost mathematical, precise way which Melvin wouldn’t even dare to try to replicate. “It’s powdered, just dump it into hot water, that’s all. Though keep away from moisture otherwise.”

Melvin, standing on his knees over the kettle and counting in his mind the appropriate seven minutes until he’d flip the power off, gave her what he hoped was a scalding look. “You are joking, right?” They didn’t have enough water. They didn’t have enough anything.

Veracity smiled — quickly, like a flash of lightning. “Not at all, cousin. Well. Maybe a little?” She lifted a hand, bringing her forefinger and thumb very close together.

Melvin huffed — then cursed to himself, realizing he’d dropped the count. The water was at a boil for at least five minutes, so it should be alright. Shouldn’t it?

He knew it was unhealthy — all the habits he’d picked up, and nervous ticks, and thoughts he returned to over and over. Tiny rituals which kept him sane but would be an impediment once he was back in Ophir. He had considered, briefly, that maybe he shouldn’t return. He couldn’t bear the sad look in Connor’s eyes.

He pressed the button, switching the power off, then filled their cups carefully with water. The tea started giving the color immediately — dark, almost carmine. Maybe something had been added to this tea… _briquette_.

He put the kettle down, then picked one cup. Double-walled, it kept his hands from burning, but for a brief moment he had an urge to dip his fingers into hot water, to see whether he would feel anything.

He put the cup by her hand, retreating quickly. Veracity tapped it with her finger, brought it to her lips, blew on the surface, then took a sip — and hissed, and laughed quietly. “Hot. Don’t know why I expected something else.”

He found his face aching, and touched his lips. He was probably smiling. It would be cliche to say that he had forgotten how to. There were things here — on the front, in the trenches, in camps — to smile at, to laugh at, even though Melvin always felt cut off from others. But he was used to it, and there were moments… Moments that were not only death.

He wanted to tell Veracity.

“There was an officer,” he said, picking the other cup and leaning near her on the rolled-up mattress. “A captain — one of yours. An Auroran, I mean. He took his tea very-very weak, it was this slightly tanned water. I don’t know how he could. But he brought cinnamon buns to our tea times, and no matter how much I asked, he wouldn’t tell me where he got them. They were only slightly stale.” He mouth filled with the ghost-sweetness of those buns, fingers sticky with half-melted sugar as he pried the bits of dough apart…

Veracity smirked. “Did you sleep with him? The captain.”

He dropped his gaze.

Veracity laughed — that quiet laughter that made her body all movement. “Good! Better fucking than fighting.”

“Are you their CO?” he asked, trying to prevent any more awful jokes. Not that he minded, but they could save those for another time. Something always had to be saved, because he had to believe there _would_ be another time. “I thought your kin aren’t involved in the army.”

“Not as officers, no. And though some of us do fight, it’s more...” She wiggled her fingers by her temple. “About support and protection? Necessity. It’s so ugly, necessity.”

“So like...” He recalled a few writings. “Chaplains. But I’ve seen your kin in the field. They are not just support.”

She shrugged. “There are different views of it in the Order. Some are more... shall we say, proactive when it comes to fighting. But I wasn’t. I was — still am — to perform medical duties. And bring comfort, such as it can be found here. But the commander of this unit has been killed, and I couldn’t see any of them pushed into command position anymore. We are just...” She shook her head, grief pouring from her whole being.

Melvin thought about his fathers — historians and teachers forced to kill. Briefly, he thought of himself — what was he if not a killing machine? But he brushed that thought quickly away. He was just that — so that others didn’t have to be.

He looked through the slit in the tent flap onto the darkening camp. His people — they weren’t technomancers, but they still were _his_ : he ordered them to march into death. Maybe that was what Ian felt.

“I wish I could bring them home,” he said, startling himself. What would he bring them to, though? Poverty, illness of heart and body?

But families, too. Friends, maybe. An illusion of hope.

“Aren’t we all?” Veracity said. “Those who say they wish to keep the people here for honor or the name of the Guild should be shot.” She paused. “I have a wife, back home. Pregnant. I wonder whether I’d get to see our baby.”

“You would. You will,” he nodded. “Back in Shadowlair? I think the tea is colder now.”

Veracity rolled her shoulders, tasted the tea. “Yes! Drinkable. No, in Shadevale. She’s from Shadowlair, but I’m from Shadevale and she came to live with me in our little nowhere.”

He did smile then. “Ah, your famous Auroran Order arrogance — calling one of the industrial hearts of your Corporation a nowhere.”

Veracity snorted. “It’s nothing but a big industrial village built around factories, not even a city. Studying in Shadowlair was fun, but there must be someone of ours in Shadevale also. So I went.”

“Is your wife a technomancer, too?”

“No. She’s very smart. An engineer — compared to her, I’m just a choir girl.” She leaned back and nodded at him. “Tea?”

He picked his forgotten cup and braced himself for the heart-tripping hit of the taste — yet none came. It was sweet, with a faint cocoa undercurrent, and just right. He looked into his cup. Aside from the reddish tint, the tea looked ordinary, and had the terrible “lick-the-Esplanade” reek.

He caught Veracity smirking over her cup, but her eyes held sadness.

“You all are dead, aren’t you?”

“Depends on the definition of—”

_“Sister.”_

She chuckled — a low, roiling sound. “I’m caught. Yes, brother. We are. How did you know?”

“Many things. You don’t throw a shadow.”

“Not anymore. I walk in it, now. We all do.” She sighed, stretching under the stars.

He couldn’t recall how they had gotten here from his tent. The rock under his backside felt very real.

“Why me? Why… come to me? I’m not like you, not like your kindred.” Despite the darkness, he could see her clearly — like she was a drawing pasted onto the night.

“Oh, but you are. You _are_ kindred. They’ve made little more than living bombs out of you — but you are, still, our kindred. You know death.”

“So what are you doing?”

She shrugged. “My duty. I know you are told that our duty is to preserve knowledge and contact Earth — I read the vows you take. We take different vows, brother. We…” She shifted. “I know what others think of us. That we are unhinged, even for our kind, that we are… with _ideas_. But we were not made to rule, to be living bombs. We are to study, to question, to protect and to push ourselves forward. To throw shadow, so they could walk in it. So, that’s what I’m doing.”

“What, studying or pushing forward?”

“All of it. Death as the final frontier.” She chuckled again.

“I heard you believe there is no soul.”

“There is, but… ah, technicalities. No, there is no separate entity that is ‘you’, brother.”

“Then how… this?” He didn’t want to turn back to his camp. Maybe all of this was just in his head — yet… Yet this worry was so ridiculous. Of course this was real. Even if it might have been in his head.

“We are ripples. A breath carried on the wind. An echo of a cry. And you can hear it.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Listen. It’s the most important thing we are taught: to listen. To each other, even to those who cannot speak. To the world. Some are very good at it. Some are overwhelmed by it. There is not enough people listening.”

“I’m not… Not good with words,” he confessed. He threw an arm around his knees, the way he had done to steady himself, Sean’s head on his shoulder — in another place. “And you want me to listen?”

“Precisely that. And one day…” Her hands were on his cheeks suddenly, hot, her eyes dark with stars glimmering in them. “One day, there will be someone who will listen to you just as intently, and hear those things that your heart cries about.” She kissed him on the forehead.

The world was breathing.

“I’ll try to find your wife, Věra!” he called to the fading presence. “Shadevale, right?”

“Right!” the darkness answered. “Ruelle Melville!”

He huffed. “You are fucking kidding me.”

He lowered his head on his knees and cried.

**Author's Note:**

> A million thanks for the feedback, my comrades!


End file.
